Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Gives You Wings: Aston Martin and Red Bull to Collaborate on New Hypercar

Aston Martin hasn’t been short of news recently, what with the unveiling of the DB11 and the announcement it is to open a new factory in Wales. But the British sports-car maker has trumped all of that with the announcement it will be developing a new hypercar alongside Formula 1 team Red Bull.

Other details are noticeable only by their absence at this stage, so you’ll have to forgive us for speculating around the lack of solid facts. Aston has plenty of previous form when it comes to building high-performance cars, of course, with the One-77 being the quickest of its roadgoing offerings to date. But Red Bull has also dropped some broad hints about its ambitions to construct extreme roadgoing machinery, with Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer, having previously collaborated on various virtual concept cars including the impossibly fast X1/X2010 for Gran Turismo 5 and three more cars for GT6, and having apparently influenced the Infiniti Q50 Eau Rouge concept from a couple years ago.

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The release confirms that the final car will indeed be streetgoing, not another racetrack special like last year’s Vulcan, and goes on to say that the two companies are “in the process of developing a hypercar that combines the latest in aerodynamics from F1 and the stunning design language of an Aston Martin sports car.” We’re anticipating that the finished version, when we see it, will have lots of wings, and some kind of Formula 1–inspired hybrid system would also seem to be a fair bet. It might even dispense with any kind of internal-combustion power to become one of the mega-performance EVs that luxury makers have been promising to build for several years.